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The life of a Java team leader, architect and developer

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Role Description

Jim works as an architect, developer and team leader with the Java Platform team, “my team are all about trying to get the right transport options to present to the customer, so they have the best results for the kind of trip they’re going on at the best possible price.”

Department Description

The Java server side team have a lot to offer says Jim, because they are a “highly experienced and versatile team that offer a real opportunity to work on some cool projects and get involved in doing really interesting things with great technologies.”

“We’re using Amazon cloud, we’re using Elastic search, SOLR, and “Big Data” in the form of technologies such as Amazon Redshift, we have a lot of new and interesting technologies which we’re using in ways that are commercially very clever. We’re using them to enable us to build and grow a business, and it’s nice to see them being applied in really sensible ways that are achieving that.” The Java server side team are brimming with skilled team members who have years of experience building technology that scales, that’s robust, and that’s reliable. This offers huge benefits to someone new who wants to “tap into that experience” said Jim.

About Jim

Jim has been with CarTrawler since 2014, back when his team and the company as a whole, was much smaller. “I joined when the technology team was maybe 10 or 12 people,” said Jim, “the whole company’s been growing since then. We’ve gone from being 150 people to a company of 550 employees, and, of course, technology has grown similarly along the way.” Jim was programming for 20+ years before he found himself at CarTrawler, “it’s the thing I love, writing code, developing architectures and problem-solving.” Before joining the team Jim found himself “in all kinds of leadership and managerial and even executive roles. But it transpires, the thing that I really like most is working with small teams, and staying close to the coal face. Getting things implemented and seeing the benefits of the stuff that we implement getting used by our customers”.

About the job

Jim’s team develops back end software that goes out and connects with companies around the world in order to find transportation options for our customers, “I’m leading a team of eight people that look after building that system, maintaining it, making it efficient, performing as fast as possible.” Jim’s team also works with insights brought in from the CarTrawler data science team, which they use to try and find the most suitable transport options for their users. They apply their customer knowledge, like where they’re going, what other people at that location are booking, how many people are traveling in the group and how many bags they have.

“So our data science team feeds some insights and logic and modelling data into us, and we take that on-board as well and we might be programming all kinds of clever algorithms to take that into consideration, returning only the most valuable results to the user.”

If you’re interested in applying for a role in CarTrawler, please check our available careers opportunities.